The New Model Library. Welcome Home (New OCLC Research Project)

From an OCLC Next Article by Lynn Silipigni Connaway, Ph.D.:

Imagine heading out for a well-earned, two-week vacation. To a place you love to visit and know well. When you get there? It’s all as you remembered. And you packed perfectly. As a frequent tourist, you know what you can buy if you need and what the hotel shop has and where you can go for a good …

Then, abruptly, you’re told—you can’t go home. You’re no longer a visitor. You are now a resident. This place where you were so comfortable and relaxed as a tourist? You have to live and work here now.

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What we found during the COVID-19 crisis was that many, many people working in education and libraries and many of the communities they served were forced to switch, very quickly, from using digital tools as visitors to adopting them as residents. In some cases, these were tools and processes that some librarians had been pushing for years. But, to be honest, in some cases these tools and processes had been avoided.

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Welcome to the New Model Library. A project that provides the OCLC Research team an opportunity to discuss with global library leaders the changes that were made in library practices and policies to accommodate their communities during the COVID-19 pandemic. And where library leaders can also reflect on how a New Model Library could evolve beyond these changes.

Direct to Full Text Article

Learn More About the Project, Envisioning the New Model Library: Navigating Through the Pandemic and Beyond (via Hanging Together)

Direct to the New Model Library Web Page

New Model Library Project Objectives

The objective was to talk to approximately 30 global library leaders in North America, Europe, including UK and Ireland, the Middle East, and Asia Pacific to identify their visions for the new library models that will emerge as they look at opportunities for converting their short-term responses to the COVID-19 pandemic into positive, long-term change. Library leaders from national and public libraries (e.g., City Librarian/Deputy Librarian/Director/CEO/President) from different regions of Europe and Asia Pacific and the US (north, south, east, and west) and in rural and urban communities; and academic libraries (e.g., Dean/Director/University Librarian/Associate University Librarian) representing public, private, secular, and non-secular research, baccalaureate/4-year colleges, associate’s colleges, technical/community colleges from different regions of the US (north, south, east, and west).

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